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At the end of a long trip last week, I took a taxi from a BART mass transit station in San Francisco’s East Bay back to my house a few miles away.

As the law requires, I could only choose the first cab in line at the taxi stand, which was filthy. The driver begrudgingly popped the trunk, which was full of garbage, so I could stow my own suitcase inside. Throughout the ride, the driver never stopped talking on a headset connected to his cell phone, blasting the radio in the back seat so I couldn’t overhear his private conversation.

The driver had no idea where he was going, even though we weren’t leaving the city in which he picked me up, and asked repeatedly for me to tell him how to get there, directions he ignored, nearly missing every turn. He said nothing when I paid him, and sped off before I’d made it to the curb.

The sad truth is that there’s nothing even slightly unusual about that experience, and certainly no point to complaining to the cab company or any regulator. I got to my destination, I was charged what the meter said, and no one was killed. In regulated industries, that constitutes success.

So it’s no wonder that in the bizarro world of licensed taxicabs and limousines, incumbents faced with the sudden arrival of disruptive technologies that could vastly improve their quality, efficiency and profitability but which also introduce new competitors and new supply chain partners, respond as if their very existence is threatened. It is, of course.

Uber, which launched in 2009, allows users to arrange for limousines and, in some cities, taxicabs, using a smartphone app. Uber doesn’t provide its own vehicles or operators, but works with existing licensed drivers to help keep already-rolling vehicles busy transporting customers. Riders can track the location of their dispatched drivers using GPS, and pay directly on their phones. They can also rate the drivers.

These are all by now standard uses of off-the-shelf mobile technology. There's nothing especially novel, or proprietary, about the platform Uber has built. Nothing, in any case, that couldn’t or shouldn’t have already been implemented by existing taxi and limo services.

Instead of responding to a new kind of virtual competitor with better products and services, however, the highly-regulated taxi and limousine companies in every city Uber has entered have instead gone the route of trying to ban Uber’s existence.

They've called on state and local regulators to declare the service in violation of decades-old laws outlawing unlicensed ride services, often based on technical definitions of "meters," "dispatch," and "taxi."

At the annual meeting in Washington last month of the Congressional Internet Caucus, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who had just taken his first ride using Uber, interviewed company CEO Travis Kalanick on the regulatory barriers the company and other technology-enabled ride services face.

In some cities, Kalanick told the Congressman, pitting the regulators against the new services has worked, at least so far.

Uber can’t operate in Miami, for example, where existing laws were clearly drafted to protect taxicabs from competition even from other licensed services. Limousines are prohibited from picking up passengers less than an hour after receiving a reservation, for example, and the minimum fare by law is $80. The number of limousine licenses has long been limited to five hundred and fifty.

Indeed, according to Kalanick, the company has spent much of its young life fighting in courts, public utility commissions, and city councils for the ability to offer any service at all. Uber has already fought charges, fines and bans in San Francisco, Chicago, Massachusetts, New York, Washington D.C, and recently in Toronto, where city officials have charged the company with dispatching rides without a license.

In D.C. and San Francisco, however, Uber has successfully fought back, scoring dramatic reversals. Regulatory bans and stiff penalties have transformed into promises to liberalize if not to rethink entirely the rationale behind tightly-regulating paid ride services. The D.C. city council, for example, suddenly reversed an outright ban on the service, creating in December a new class of digitally-dispatched rides.

And in California last month, the state Public Utility Commission entered into an agreement with Uber that allows it to continue operating while a rulemaking is pending to revise existing regulations.

The PUC is also considering changes that would allow Uber and other mobile app-based services, such as Lyft and Sidecar, to facilitate consumer-to-consumer ride-sharing. Such services are part of a growing new sharing economy in which ordinary people can make money using their personal assets to offer everything from sleeping space (e.g,, Airbnb) to parking to pet boarding and handyman services.

These new companies are already causing disruption to long-mature supply chains. Avis recently paid $500 million for car-sharing service Zipcar, largely for access to its network of nearly 1 million members.

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From an economic standpoint, virtual asset managers and sharing services take advantage of ubiquitous mobile devices and increasingly high-speed broadband networks to maximize the use of skills and property that otherwise lies fallow.